


Scavengers

by chancellorxofxtrash (PhoebeMurdivine)



Series: Daemons & Naritaverse [9]
Category: Baccano!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Multi, Ouch, Polyamory, alas he does not stop, also general warning for Huey's callous behaviour about his homunculi, and by that i mean he is horrible and he should Stop, because he is horrible, i mean uhhh it's these three what do you expect, lots of ouchies, naritaverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8978932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoebeMurdivine/pseuds/chancellorxofxtrash
Summary: It was harder to properly identify a daemon in the past.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Quick summary of Daemon AU's and this one in particular:
> 
> \- Every human being has a daemon, from their birth. They are a part of their soul, in a form of an animal, basically a representation of their souls. They are not always follow stereotypes associated with their animals however, there are many different interpretations.  
> \- When they are kids, their daemons often change forms, they are not settled. It's during their teenage years they finally "settle" into their final form, but it changes for everyone.  
> \- Most of the time the daemon's gender is different than the human's.  
> \- Touching someone's daemon is taboo. Especially without consent. It can happen when people are especially close to each other, like lovers, but never publicly. Touching someone's daemon without consent or warning is at the very least uncomfortable, but it can be outright painful.  
> \- Hurting the daemon hurts the human, and vice versa.  
> \- If the daemon dies, the human dies too.  
> \- The daemons of other supernatural beings are explained in later stories.  
> \- Daemons' talk is written in italics  
> \- Vampires' daemons are just as varied as the vampires themselves.  
> \- Homunculi depend a lot on how they were created

When a child’s daemon settles way too young, people talk. They keep whispering. Not to the face of the child or the parents (if there are any), oh no. That’d be improper.

But people talk, and Huey knew this fact.

“It has to be his mother’s curse”, people whispered.

“The witch cursed her son.”

Using daemons for hunting witches was one thing - daemons who were birds were immediately under suspicion. Young settling daemons too.

So people were distant to Huey, with the big, kind of intimidating bird following him.

Apart from being a bird of prey, it was hard for the people to realise exactly what Perla was.

“She’s a crow, I’m telling you. Just a bigger one.”

“No, it can’t be a crow! Have you seen her head? That’s not a crow head.”

“She looks kind of like a vulture, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, kind of, but a pitch-black vulture? That doesn’t sound right. Besides poor boy suffered so much, she doesn’t deserve a vulture daemon.”

As for Perla herself… well. She didn’t care much. She’d spread her wings, and fly over Lotto Valentino, following Huey from a safe distance. Professor Dalton did help Huey try to classify her, and confirmed Huey’s suspicions.

“Well, I do believe Perla is a vulture. No official classification exists for her yet. Has some similarities to _Aegypidus monachus,_ but too many differences to classify her as such.”

“So she’s a vulture.”

Huey’s voice stayed calm, as he ran a hand over Perla’s feathers.

“Now I do know vultures have a reputation, but you have to know as an alchemist how important scavengers like them are to natu--”

“I know. Thank you for the help, Professor Dalton.”

In the end, it didn’t matter much to Huey, that what Perla was. She was part of him, and this was the form she ended up taking, and in a way, Huey felt she was somehow fitting either way.

-

(It wasn’t until decades later, after going to America, that Huey had actually seen vultures like Perla is. Black vulture. _Coragyps atratus._

It still didn’t matter much to Huey, in the end.)

-

It probably wasn’t that surprising, that the other boy, whose mother was said to be a witch had a daemon already settled too, when he came in, and he was very eager to talk about her.

“Actually, she had been settled for a while, yes. I was told she was too early, but oh well, look at her! She laughs so much!”

And laugh, she did, her fur spotty, her grin matching Elmer’s, her weird movements following him.

Most of the citizens of Lotto Valentino had no idea what Ada was supposed to be. They couldn’t even guess.

To the alchemists, her species was obvious. _Crocuta crocuta._ Spotted hyena.

She was rarely speaking, if ever, mostly laughed, and often people heard her laugh before they had seen Elmer.

-

(Huey never paid much attention to other hyenas, even when he had seen them years later.

It didn’t matter.

They were not Ada, and their laugh was nothing like Ada’s either way.)

-

Monica’s daemon also settled early, but most people didn’t even notice it. After all, Monica was so nice, and so kind. Nothing bad ever happened to her, nothing to feel sorry for. They just assumed Lino liked the form of a wolf.

After all, he was a wolf, right? Made sense. Italians who had a wolf daemon were often proud, cultural heritage and everything.

Yes, Lino was smaller than a wolf, but it didn’t change much, right? Just a small wolf. What else could he be?

Lino wasn’t the most talkative daemon either, he was usually just following Monica silently, always on her heels. Not many people knew, but his teeth were just as sharp as the stiletto she carried under her sleeve, his claws also being just as deadly.

Just as ready to use them.

-

(Again, it wasn’t until decades later when the recognition hit Huey.

Lino wasn’t a wolf.

_Canis latrans._

Coyote.

It explained so much, in retrospect, but changed nothing.)

-

-

“Monimoni! Nono! We need your help with something very-very important. Extremely important.”

Monica and Lino exchanged a look as they turned around, seeing Elmer and Ada run up to them. Honestly, it was a miracle both of them could stop before crashing into them. Then again, both of them were slightly more graceful than they looked. Slightly.

“I’m gonna need your help”

“Yes, Elmer, you already said that. What is it?”

Elmer’s smile didn’t disappear - Monica quite frankly couldn’t imagine a situation where Elmer wouldn’t be smiling. He would smile even when he’d die, asking his murderer to smile as well.

“We gotta make Huey smile!”

Of course. Of course this was it. What else? Monica smiled a little (which, if possible, made Elmer’s smile even wider), and decided to go with it.

Saying no to Elmer only led to even wilder things in the near future, and it wasn’t like she hated the idea of making Huey smile.

“Alright, Elmer. What’s the plan?”

As a response, Elmer clapped his hands together, and looked down at Lino with a smile.

“I’ll need Nono’s help for this, though! He is probably the most instrumental of this whole thing!”

Most people usually didn’t directly address daemons - it was not taboo, far from it, but still considered improper. And inappropriate. And every other word describing this.

Elmer usually didn’t care, he wanted the daemons to be happy too. _To do the closest they can to smiling._ Which was somewhat of a sensible goal with Lino, well, at least close enough, but Monica sincerely doubted he could make Perla smile. Hard to smile with a beak.

 _She can laugh, though_ Elmer said once, when Huey pointed it out to him once. _She can laugh. And that is close enough for me._

He couldn’t yet make Perla laugh, but when she would pull herself close to Lino, putting her wings around him, she’d leave out some happy noises and it was… very nice. Sometimes she’d do something similar to Ada too, landing on her back, her wings playfully covering her eyes for a few moments, causing Ada to laugh uncontrollably, and Perla also giving out some smugly content noises.

Neither of the three daemons liked to talk a lot, but not like they needed to.

And out of the three of them Ada talked the least, mostly just laughing, following Elmer around cheerfully. Monica actually never heard her talk for real.

 _I heard her talk once,_ Huey had told her, when Monica brought it up, and Huey was playing with her hair while talking. _They sometimes talk with Perla, although I usually don’t hear it. But she_ **_can_ ** _talk. Maybe she just thinks Elmer talks enough for the both of them._

Huey and Monica both knew that it wasn’t that simple with Elmer and Ada, but they pretended to agree on this conclusion.

By the way, Lino agreed to Elmer’s plan, obviously. So Monica went to a nearby cave and hid.

And waited.

Monica ran a hand through Lino’s fur. Maybe it would have been too dangerous for a young lady to hide in a cave all alone.

But not like Monica was defenseless, was she?

Obviously not.

-

“Elmer, this is ridiculous, even if werewolves exist, there are definitely none of them in the nearby caves.”

“No, I know it lives there! Professor Renée said as such!”

“...did she really.”

“Well, more or less, yes. She didn’t _deny_ it, so it’s just as much of an admission, really!”

Huey sighed, tiredly, following Elmer. For Perla, it was much easier, without having to walk, but Huey himself had some trouble climbing up to the cave. Whenever he’d lose his balance though, Elmer would turn back, grab his hand, and help him further up.

Huey was past the point of pretending that his heartrate spiked up just because of the climbing. This was just a thing that happened around Monica a lot, and yes, around Elmer too. It was just… there.

So yeah he went with it, and went with Elmer’s ridiculous ideas, because what else would he have done?

“Why didn’t you ask Monica?”

“Oh, I did, but the patisseire lady asked her to help her out today.”

“Really? I thought she didn’t have to help out today…”

“Ah, Essa suddenly ordered a bunch of cakes. You know how he is, he likes the idea of giving them work to do so they don’t starve, but also to treat the ladies at his place as well.”

Something was _really_ off to Huey about this, but really, he didn’t know Esperanza Boronial _that well_ to prove Elmer wrong.

So he just went with him.

-

Fifteen minutes, one growling wolf-like shadow, Huey jumping up and almost landing in Elmer’s arms, and one laughing fit (thanks, Ada) later, Huey was fuming as he looked at the other two.

“Not funny.”

“I think it was! Come on, Huey! You’ve been missing Monica haven’t you? Now all three of us are together!”

“This was a juvenile prank, and I do not like it. Making it seem like Lino is way bigger, and making him growl...”

“I think Lino liked looking big” Elmer interjected, and Lino indeed looked rather proud next to Monica.

“I also think it was funny” Monica added with a small smile on her face.

“If you wanted to be together, there were better way, don’t you think? Why this cave, this is all uncomfortable, and…”

Huey went on, angrily and Monica and Elmer exchanged a look.

Then Monica stepped forward, grabbed Huey’s shoulders, and stopped his angry speech with a kiss. As soon as they kissed, Monica felt the tension from Huey’s shoulders disappear - then the kiss ended, Monica stepped back, whirled Huey around right into Elmer’s arms, into Elmer’s also-eager kiss. Huey flailed a little cluelessly as he spun around, but he leaned into Elmer’s kiss just as much.

When that kiss ended, Huey did smile a little, and Elmer grinned wide.

“See, Monica? We made him smile! I think this means our plan was a success!”

As they usually did.

-

Right until they couldn’t.

-

The only time a human being is completely alone is in death. Their constant companions, the daemons on their side right from birth, they do not stay with them in the grave. Religions often said a daemon disappears because they reform right with the soul in the next world. The person dies, the soul perishes, so does the daemon.

Huey couldn’t have cared less about the next world, when Monica fell off the ship, and Lino disappeared in a swirl of golden dust.

-

“See you.”

He left Elmer behind on the docs, and he didn’t look back, and he just listened to Elmer’s chipper goodbye, and Ada’s laugh, as Perla just followed him with slow wing movements, and she spoke.

She still didn’t like to speak, but she had to speak up.

_“Even if you bring Monica back, do you think she’d be happy without Lino?”_

“I do not intend to bring her back without him” Huey said simply. “It is impossible to retrieve her body from the ocean either way. So if I bring her back, I’ll have to construct a body for her. And when I bring her back, Lino has to come along too.”

Perla didn’t say anything else, so Huey walked without a word as well.

There was no other way, and now that not even death could stand in Huey’s way, nothing would stop him from reaching his goal.

-

“You’ll see, Perla” He whispered to her, as he looked over his homunculi in his lab. All the creatures he created. None of them having a daemon.

None of them humans, after all. Homunculi research was probably not the path to bring Monica back, unless he could make it better.

So he tried over and over again, to learn more about it. Perfect them. Make them better.

But apart from the hiveminds, none of them could develop a daemon-like being. But they were just secondary daemons, second companions, spiders for Sham, falcons for Hilton. The original bodies of the hiveminds had their daemons transform into these animals right away - Liza had only one daemon, and so did Sham’s first vessel.

But none of them could talk. Liza’s falcon was eternally quiet, a female falcon, never talking. None of their bodies had secondary daemons that could talk.

Another failure.

-

(Maybe the new one, the new one he was prepared to let take over the entire city. Maybe they would work.)

(Bringing back someone? You have to work with a soul first. A body is secondary. He can create a new body. He could create whatever body he wanted. or whatever she wished for. The problem was the soul, the problem was the daemon. Hivemind research was the closest he got to create a daemon, so he had to know more.)

(So he needed a bigger data to continue.)

-

“One of your homunculi has a daemon. What’s up with that, by the way?”

He only glanced at Fermet from the corner of his eye.

“Interesting phenomenon isn’t it? I’d like to get my hands on him again, to figure it out.”

Of course he knew about Christopher and his platypus. Sham and Hilton both reported this change to him.

Because of course they did.

“Hm? Don’t you have Szilard’s homunculus in your captivity? Why don’t you try with her?”

“It is currently not my priority. Besides, she is in Melvi’s captivity. Not mine” Huey said simply.

It was better to not have personal contact with Ennis, while she was a captive. Claiming Ennis as his experiment currently would have had more negatives to it than profit.

Besides, he could always get Christopher later.

-

Huey ran his hands over Perla’s feathers, as he looked over the city, which was full with his experiments for tonight.

“Did you know that scavengers are really not as simple as humans think they are?”

He asked this of one of Hilton’s falcons - the falcon flew up, the vessel was somewhere down the street, so nobody could reply. Not that Huey was really interested in what Hilton had to say.

It was irrelevant in the big scheme of things.

“People say scavengers are dirty for eating dead bodies. Or cowardly, because they don’t kill their own prey. But that is not true - for a lot of scavengers, they still can get their meat from predatory behaviour as well. But because people believe scavengers to be cowardly, or lazy… well. It can cause some unpleasant surprises.”

Huey had a wry smile on his face - and he couldn’t stop himself from thinking _Elmer would complain so much upon seeing this smile_ before pushing the thought away.

“Let’s cause some unpleasant surprises."

**Author's Note:**

> New daemons!
> 
> Huey Laforet's daemon - Perla, black vulture  
> Monica Campanella's daemon - Lino, coyote


End file.
